A changed climate will expose European cities to environmental pressures. The SUDPLAN project - Sustainable Urban Development Planner for Climate Change Adaptation - aims at developing a web-based planning, prediction and training tool to support decisions in long term urban planning. This will help to assure population´s health, comfort, safety and life quality as well as sustainability of investments in utilities and infrastructures within a changing climate. With it´s open nature and architectural design, SUDPLAN will contribute to a shared information space in Europe.

ADAPTATION TO CLIMATE CHANGE

Planning for environmental factors

Sustainable cities require an integrated planning approach. SUDPLAN services will allow the assessment of some of the most important environmental factors - storm water flooding, river flooding and air pollution. City planners can assess, for present as well as for different climate scenario conditions, the consequences of possible future solutions for urbanization, infrastructure and transport systems.

Future climate in Europe

SUDPLAN services offer visualisation of precipitation and temperature scenarios based on output from Regional Climate Models, together with Pan-European model output of air quality and hydrological conditions. SUDPLAN uses the Pan-European scenarios as a basis for a further downscaling to a particular city.

Storm water flooding and CSO management

The risk of storm water flooding over sealed surfaces and the overflow in urban sewer systems, for now and within different climate change scenarios, will be possible to assess. SUDPLAN pilots will develop planning tools for dimensioning of water runoff systems and other infrastructure solutions to mitigate the effects of storm water flooding and of combined sewer overflows (CSO) into receiving waters.

River flooding

Many European cities are suffering from river flooding, caused by precipitation and melting snow linked to upstream river basins rather than by what is happening in the city itself. Other problems can be droughts or water shortage. The SUDPLAN tool can be used to evaluate the hydrological consequences of different local land use and urbanization, for present and future climatic conditions.

Air pollution

Urban air pollution builds up by the impact from sources on many scales, from the global down to microscale environments like a particular street pavement. The SUDPLAN tool includes a coupled model system that goes from the European scale down to invididual streets. It will determine the risks for exceedances of national standards and environmental goals, today and under a future changed climate.

SUDPLAN COMPONENTS

Scenario Management System

Common Services

Downscaled precipitation, temperature, hydrological and air pollution data for visualization in the Scenario Management System or for downloading as input data to local models. Common Services will be available for all cities in Europe.